A part time stay home dad enjoying (nearly) every minute of it…

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Bumble Bees and the Grass Goblins

Our yard is full of dandelions. It looks like a dandelion farm. I kid you not. The mower mows most of them. Some are still too short. No matter. They grow fast enough that by tomorrow they’ll have predominantly all returned. But did you know there is a war being raged ona miniature scale to keep those dandelions yellow?

Battles ensue between the bumble bees and the Grass Goblins. We have all seen buzzlebees. They’re big, round, fuzzy, yellow and black striped and love yellow dandelions. It’s wings appear too small to be effective, but provide the bee with flight nonetheless. They don’t mind us humans and generally leave us alone. Their cousins, the hornets and wasps, are the cranky ones who hate us with a vengeance. But the bumble bee is much calmer. Unless it’s up against a Grass Goblin.

Now, if you’ve never seen a Grass Goblin consider yourself lucky. They’re ugly. They make scorpions look cute and cuddly. They are slightly smaller than their bumble bee enemies. They are unnaturally thin with blades of grass sprouting from their head and back. They are covered in warts that would make a toad jealous. Naturally, they’re greenish brown. The Grass Goblins turn all those bright yellowy flowers into white puff balls to use as parachutes and gliders in a blitzkrieg against the bees.

The bees, of course, hate that. They feast upon dandelion nectar and, consequently, pollinate the vibrant flowers. Those white puff balls are completely useless to the bees objective. So the bees wage war against the Grass Goblins to save their food supply.

Or so a certain, lovable, wildly imaginative 4 (soon to be 5) year old, Bang, believes. Perhaps because that’s the story his father told him while they were playing the backyard. Not long after being hearing this story, said four year old found a white puffball dandelion and took it to a bumble bee asking it to turn it back to yellow. Apparently it was too late to save the flower. So Bang blew off all the seeds so the Grass Goblins couldn’t use it against the cute, fuzzy buzzle bee.